


Dissolution

by SilverDagger



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: AU, Alternate Character Interpretation, Character Study, Dark, F/M, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-26
Updated: 2012-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-19 14:22:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/574201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>His father's Cetra, right up until the day his father had died.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dissolution

**Author's Note:**

> AU in which Aeris never escaped from Hojo's lab. Evil!Aeris, darkish, could be interpreted as somewhat dubcon.

What Rufus likes best about the tower suite is its impeccable order – not the austerity of the barracks and training grounds, or the pristine white of the labs, but everything is, nevertheless, in its place. The old President had had a taste for opulence. Rufus prefers refinement, and it shows. The furniture is modern, all clean, spare lines, the kind of expensive that doesn't need to be ostentatious. Books line the walls, leatherbound, arranged alphabetically by author and by title. He's read about half of them. The rest are for show.

Things are seldom where they shouldn't be, here, and when they are, he always notices.

He notices now.

What catches his attention first is the flowers sitting in a bowl on the counter, which were not there when he left this morning, and have no reason to be there now. The bowl is Wutaian crystal – one of old man Shinra's war trophies, which makes it his war trophy now, and far too fine to be used for holding anything that grew up out of dirt. He thinks – he isn't sure – that the flowers might be foxglove, digitalis, little purple bells all in a row. And he notices a window open, curtains drawn wide. Rain on city streets, filling the room with the smell of asphalt and wet leaves, the heavy wildness of seasons changing.

And by the other, still-closed window that spans the length of one wall, looking out on the carnival spectacle of rain-blurred lights below, there is a divan. And on that divan is a woman, her body angled for her to peer down on his city, her fingers splayed out on the cool glass. Her head is turned away from him, but the eyes reflected in the window are SOLDIER-bright in a ghostly face. He hadn't been expecting her. This does not alter the knowledge that she, too, is precisely in her place.

The woman rises, turns toward him. He knows her. He doesn't know her name, or even if she has one, but he knows _her_. Hojo's lab-rat, he thinks, tracking the way she moves – abrupt, mechanical, like something almost but not quite human or alive. The white hospital gown she's wearing is soaked through, dripping puddles on floor and furniture. She hasn't changed it since... well. She hasn't changed it _since_ , and if he could, he would make her trade it in for something different, less rain-drenched and filthy, with no rust-colored stains at the hem or trailing down the sleeves. _Ruining the furniture_ , he thinks, distantly, because the alternative is something much closer to scrabbling, irrational panic than he has ever been willing to entertain, in himself or any of his associates.

His father's Cetra, right up until the day his father had died.

Rufus remembers how that had happened – blood pooling on a mahogany desk, dripping onto the floor, and him not even the one to do it. Shadows in the corners of the office suite, and maybe movement in those shadows – things from the disaster in the labs below crawling their way up, perhaps, and he had kept his finger on his shotgun's trigger, kept his back to the wall and his attention on the periphery. The solitude had been hungry, encompassing. _Funny thing, all that blood_ , he remembers thinking. He always had been the one left cleaning up his father's messes.

He hadn't heard her move, then, but he had seen her, a flash of white in the corner of his vision – as pale as she is now, like something that belongs underground growing up where it shouldn't be, her eyes a mossy green, her hair coming loose from a long braid. He remembers that. The eyes, the hair. Her dress had been white, where it wasn't red. Her hands were – 

_“You killed him,”_ he remembers saying. Carelessly, nonchalant in voice and gesture. You never met strength with weakness. He had learned that much long ago, and he hasn't forgotten it yet.

 _“He wanted what wasn't his to take,”_ she had said, quiet, almost gentle. _“He was killing the Planet. He hurt my mother.”_

And she had considered Rufus with ancient indifference.

_“You're his blood.”_

_“That's his blood,”_ he had said then, waving a hand in the direction of his father's corpse. _“I have my own. I'd prefer to keep it.”_

He'd had his gun. The guards in the labs down there, they had guns too. He'd had a chance to die well, to die as he willed, not like his father at his desk in a puddle of his own piss. He remembers feeling the heft of the shotgun in his hands and wondering if he even had a chance to win. He remembers her stepping forward, reaching out.

Then there had been wind rising around him, force and pressure and the shatter of windows, howling darkness beneath. He remembers closing his eyes, shielding his face – all instinct, no thought – and when he opened them again, she was gone. The room was empty, except for him and a corpse, blown-out glass scattered in galaxies across the floor. And there were sirens rising from the labs below, prisoners loose somewhere in the tower, and other things too that he didn't want to deal with and knew better than to ignore for long. And she was gone.

And now she's here again, taking up space in another building she doesn't own, marking down one more place for ruin.

He thinks of Tseng, who had been her handler, now doing his time in intensive with broken bones and lacerations, internal damage, somehow still breathing. But Tseng – he would have been kind to her, perhaps. He always was, until kindness no longer served a purpose, and even then he was efficient enough to be merciful. Rufus had never seen him cause pain without reason. Perhaps that kindness had saved his life.

Perhaps nothing had saved his life but chance.

The Cetra moves now to stand by a mahogany bookcase, trailing rainwater, and cold currents seem to follow. Her thin fingers drift over expensive keepsakes, the spines of books of books he has read and books he hasn't, until she finds something and lifts it, considers it in the light. He doesn't have to look close to know what's in her hands. The faded photograph of a blonde-haired woman, smiling with white even teeth against a backdrop of candlelight, all shimmering, stagelit glamour. She considers it like a curiosity, some rare artifact unearthed from a different age.

“That isn't yours,” he says. His mouth is dry, sweat pricking on his neck and between his shoulderblades. His tongue tastes like cotton and copper, formaldehyde. His father's Cetra smiles.

“You speak as if your family has never taken anything that doesn't belong to you,” she says, and sets the picture down, reaches for something else on the shelf beside it – something that flashes once, incandescent, at her touch, fades to quiescence and leaves negative images swimming in his vision. The useless materia, held in her open palm now, with uneasy flickers of energy dancing within like lightning between charged poles. She closes her hand around it, tender, possessive.

“Your father gave this to you.”

“No,” Rufus says. “He lost it. I found it. You know the way these things happen.”

“He was careless,” she says, and he knows she understands from the way her lips curve upward at the corners, satisfied.

“He always has been,” Rufus says, but the Cetra's attention is not on him. She tilts her head, as if listening to something beyond the threshold of his hearing, and then phe presses the materia to the pale flesh of her arm. He sees lines of light radiate and fade along the network of her veins as the crystalized mako sinks into her skin. She looks at him, and then she moves. He has time to take one step back, find his footing, start to reach for the revolver concealed within his coat. Then she's there, in front of him, too close.

Her hands, at least, are clean. She lays them against the sides of his face, terribly gentle, as if in benediction.

“Shinra,” she breathes, like a curse, like invocation, her nails pressing hard into his skin. He can feel her body heat through the thin bloodstained gown, and he feels fear and something that isn't fear,  
But there are flowers on the counter, possibly digitalis, and she hasn't killed him yet.

 _Poison,_ he thinks. He can remember reading about that when he had been younger, and fascinated by anything that will kill a man. They use it in medicine, these days, call it a healing plant, but before that, long before modern medicine and pills and powders, people had known it for what it was. Poison. Any part of it will stop your heart.

“You want too much,” she says, and he does, all those half-forgotten images – glass, mako, dissolution, and the traces of something older that feels almost like hunger, like longing. Everything he has ever wanted and not been given. Everything he has ever had to take.

He feels the night outside pressing in, filling the air with darkness. Sees city lights reflected in glass and understands, with the clarity and bitterness of fine wine, that it's only a matter of time before the Planet takes it all back.

“And you?” he asks – enforced calm, breathing steady. “What are you after?”

She leans in close, says something that makes no sense, that sounds a lot like _holy._

It's madness, of course. No more meaningful than that. But it chills him, the sound of it, the brush of breath and two syllables and all that conviction, and there's power _there_ too, a dizzying wave of it that pulls him into its slipstream, leaves him adrift and frozen. She traces a finger down the contour of his face, temple to jawline, raising goosebumps in its wake.

“You'll see it happen, Shinra,” she says. “The Planet will wake, and rise, and you will see.” It's there in her voice again, like wind that strips you down to the bone, unrelenting. And he must be mad, too, for the way he stands still in the heart of that cyclone as she presses her mouth hard to his, and doesn't recoil from the taste of bitter mako, salt and copper and rain.

“It's a lie, isn't it?” she whispers, drawing back. “What they say about you. You bleed just like the rest of us.”

And he wonders – as he reaches up to loosen her hair from the remnants of that braid, lifts that rain-soaked dress from her thin shoulders – how close he is to learning the truth of that tonight. He wonders if he cares. She is scarred, and pale, and he can count her ribs, and he can remember his father's blood beneath her fingernails, and none of that should transfix him the way it does.

“You don't plan to kill me, then?” he says, dry amusement overlaying the catch of breath, bleeding through into genuine fear, genuine desire. Her hands are tracing down his chest, catching at the buttons on his coat as she pushes him backwards against the wall, inexorable. He wants to see blood on those hands again. It doesn't matter whether or not it's his.

“I will,” she promises. “Not tonight. But I will.”


End file.
